


To Build a Home

by Fantine_Black



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Canon Jewish Character, Communism, Erik Has Feelings, Erik Logic Is The Best Logic, Established Relationship, F/M, Healing, Jewish Identity, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Romani Character, Smitten Erik
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-12 03:48:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12950658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fantine_Black/pseuds/Fantine_Black
Summary: Erik's life is turning out like a fairy tale of old: he will build Magda a refuge, snug and safe, deep in the forest. But to win the love of his princess, every hero must conquer a challenge.





	To Build a Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten) in the [secret_mutant_madness_2017](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/secret_mutant_madness_2017) collection. 



‘No metal.’

He turns around, a supplicant, but still upset enough as if she’d calmly declared he was not to use any air. Magda doesn’t move at all.

He tries. ‘Magdele, kochanie – ’

She smiles at him. ‘English, dear.’

He grabs her waist. ‘My dearest darling honeybuns, sweetie pie, lovey dove –how am I to build you a home without using a saw, hm?’

She crawls her fingers through his hair. ‘This is not a joke, love.’

Love - the way the word rolls from her tongue – no one speaks like her, like them, lost in their little cocoon. But now her sweet eyes have him terrified.

He looks down. ‘Why would you ask that of me?’

She looks at him, both hands on his cheeks. ‘Are you afraid?’

He stiffens. ‘Yes – ’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘We’re going back.’

To Warschau. She seems determined to find every festering wound in his soul and stick her fingers in it.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Magda, wait!’

She turns, and he frowns.

‘You know you can’t ask that,’ he says. ‘You can’t.’

She grins. ‘I’m cold.’

‘But – ’

‘Bye, Erik!’ She runs off, giggling, and for a second looks exactly like Nina Rosenblatt, the classmate that first lit his heart, and his loins, on fire – partly because she spoke Yiddish well enough to make sense of his German-infused Polish, partly because she’d shown him there was laughter to be had even in this place, lightyears away from his parents’ poisoned paradise.

(Also, her tush).  

 Nina Rosenblatt, of course, was gassed in Majdanek – gutting the bureaucrat responsible for that transport has been satisfying – but Magda’s here, so undeniably present that he feels fourteen (but stronger). He tackles her, and breaks their fall less than an inch off the ground.

She kisses his nose. ‘Brute.’

He nips at her neck. ‘Hmmm.’ Then he rolls on top of her, trapping her hands above her head. ‘Mine.’

 She lifts her chin. ‘Prove it.’

Would that he could. She’s so perfect for him it seems pre-ordained, somehow: marrying some shikse has always been unspeakable, and a Jewish girl, with so few left – no, he doesn’t deserve that. He’s failed his people too many times – failed Papa, who never saw him bar mitswa’d; failed Mama, whom he couldn’t save, failed to do his duty to them both in death –barracks full of Jewish men, and no-one to form a minyan with.

(He dares not visit shul.)

Still, not to have a Jewish wife - who else, but Charles, could understand (Charles, whom he’d failed too)?

But Magda, who’s been in Auschwitz– quite a lot younger than him, mercifully, perhaps, although that smell never leaves – and ‘privileged’ enough, as a ‘gypsy’, not to be gassed right away. She would have been, if an SS-man had not bought her and her mother out (not her father, incidentally, as it had been a good chance for him to get rid of a rival). He’d taken them to Warschau, but left them when the Russians came –

‘Erik, you’re not with me.’

He frees her hands to cup her face. ‘Sorry, love.’

(It’s so hard to focus, hold a conversation, or be in his own body at all – for the humans to take all that from him, and not to be able to take it back -)

Oh. _That_ always works. He bucks up into her hand, but then he kisses her, slipping his hands under her blouse, kneading her breasts (they perfectly fit his palms, how is such a thing even possible) before Magda moans, pushing his hands down. He lifts himself up enough to feel her pussy through her skirt, but Magda breaks the kiss to whisper: ‘Take them off,’ in his ear.

With pleasure. He spreads her legs for easier access –he’d love to take her panties and rip them, but she’d never forgive him (he’d have to spend hours in line to get new ones, make no mistake, as she certainly wouldn’t be the one to do it). So he grabs her underwear, pulls it down and puts it aside, opens his own pants, lifts her up and pushes in.

Gott _–_ his love likes it rough. Before, he couldn’t pace – ten years, ten years without touch, let alone sex, left him an animal, and though he’s hardly better now, Magda says she’s fine – she, too, screws like ghetto women, grabbing every bit of pleasure before it can be snatched away.

They’re both up quickly, but other than normal he wraps her in his arms and holds her still, causing the air around him to go warm. ‘My powers can be very practical…’

‘No!’ She pushes him off. ‘It's my one condition, Erik, take it or leave it, but if you can’t do it, leave me to my work.’

‘I. Can’t. Do. Magic!’ he yells back, but follows her home – how he hates that city, where every street corner assaults him – though for her he’d bear it, no question, of course he would. The next days, he buries himself in books, but gets more frustrated by the minute.

‘Magdalein,’ he says one night, ‘unless you want me to build tools out of flint or bone, I don’t see how – ’

She looks at him, exasperated. ‘It isn’t hard, Erik. I said _you_ can’t use metal. That’s all I said.’

 He sits there, quiet for a minute, but then says: ‘If I start hiring construction crews, don’t you think people will get a little suspicious?’

She smiles. ‘Yes.’

‘But –’

‘Figure it out, Erik,’ she says, returning to her books.

He hardly sleeps that night. Getting help from humans, Poles – as if most of them helped, when the whole ghetto was begging for assistance? But then he looks at Magda, snuggled by his side.

Perhaps for her.

It’s not like they’re very welcoming. ‘Where are you from, anyway?’ he answers with ‘Around’, and when they ask him what that means: ‘Around enough to know  you’re lousy smugglers.’ 

Of course that puts them on his case, but he has far more dirt on them than they do on him (not too difficult, as he can sense most of their hidden contraband), and a few concussions later (he’s missed hand to hand combat, it really has its charms) they come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. They promise to build his house, and in return, he gets them better contacts – police, mostly, which helps make sure that nobody gets too interested in this neck of the woods.

It’s all good.

Except the tiny little fact they’re also lousy builders.

That isn’t entirely fair. They can’t build what he wants, mostly because the materials on offer are abysmal. Here too, the Sovjets want their due, and leave them with the scraps – which in practice makes copper far more valuable than gold. They’ve started building plastic car parts, a thought that makes him shiver.

He’s also worried about the water supply. It should be crystal clear, given their surroundings, but most residents still use a pump – and no wonder, given that a lot of what comes from pipes is brown and heavily metallic; the system feels like it has not been updated since the war.

 And it’s not as if he cares, as such, but Poland has been good to his people for a long time and if it weren’t for the Nazis those pipes would have been decent and –

It takes four months, but the water from the pipes is fresh and sweet.

Magda’s not amused. ‘You call this laying low?’

‘Iwo and Jurek did most of the talking, and Lech from the city is constantly drunk. To him I’m just a welder.’ He looks away. ‘It’s nothing to do with the house, Magdele, I didn’t break –’

He’s regulated to garden duty regardless, which he likes just fine, as it means that Magda comes with him – shortly after getting her doctorate she’s already been charged with finding new and better ways of collective food production (a farce, if he asks her, but it _is_ a steady paycheck). They clear a patch near their building site for an experimental vegetable garden and borrow a horse to get stumps out.

It’s the biggest test yet.

‘This is pointless,’ he says. ‘The poor horse – there are machines that do this in three minutes!’

‘Machines we can’t afford, sweetheart.’ She sighs. ‘Few of us can.’

‘I could – ’

‘Now that really would get people’s attention.’ She gestures at the tree. ‘Come on, heave!’

In frustration, he takes up knitting, which makes people around him think that Magda is some sort of domestic goddess, given the intricacy of the designs. And even though Ewa, Tamary and Gosia can knit themselves, they appreciate the gifts enormously – indeed, their lives have markedly improved with Iwo’s, Jurek’s and Bodhan’s extra income, and after Erik fixes the church’s plumbing  even the priest forgives ‘Henryk’ for never showing up there. If any of them have questions, they soon know enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Magda and Erik return to the city less and less, sleeping at their neighbours’ when weather doesn’t permit camping. That is to say – Magda sleeps, Erik snatches some rest in the time after everybody else is definitely unconscious, always careful to wake first. Over time, he’s the first to start breakfast, which makes Gosia sigh with happiness (her morning sickness makes that chore especially taxing). ‘You’re raising the bar,’ Bodhan grumbles, but shakes his hand when no-one’s looking.

Mostly Erik digs in dirt, watching the house appear painfully slowly – this is a side project for them, and other than some heavy lifting, he can’t be of much help. Things change as a week of brutal night frost in May makes normal farm work impossible. ‘The harvest’s gone,’ Iwo sobs. ‘My friend, you have to help us.’

‘My friend’…

But he can’t risk another shipment. They need other additional work, independent of the weather.

‘A factory,’ he says to Magda. ‘Subsistence farming isn’t enough, we both know that!’

‘I’ve looked at their storage,’ Magda says. ‘Don’t worry, Erik, this won’t kill them.’

‘Not this year, no,’ he sighs. Then he turns back. ‘So what if it fails, Magda, it’ll mean the world to them, call it an experiment or something. Just get me permission.’

She smiles. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Have Jurek get them whisky.’

For one short moment, Charles’ face flashes before him. ‘Deal,’ he says curtly.

He joins people in the fields when Magda doesn’t need help, spends the rest of the time drawing and planning. (He’s tried stripping the metal from brushes once, but to no avail; which means he can’t even paint his own walls.) The best he can do to speed things up for himself is help out with their chores, which he often does during Mass. (If people ask how their gutters got cleaned, he shrugs. They may not have been dirty.)

But they, too, band together. The first room finished is their bedroom –Jurek’s boy Izak helps lug the mattress upstairs, blushing profusely. But Erik mostly stares at the little crib. ‘Magda has stopped bending over,’ Ewa says. ‘Hadn’t you noticed?’

When he asks her later, she turns her head way. ‘I might have been,’ she says. ‘I think it isn’t time yet.’

‘Let me help,’ he implores, but she shakes her head.

‘We have a factory to build.’

Meanwhile, in spite of the field work (and the smuggling) room after room gets finished. When the meagre harvest is done, Magda and Erik return to Warschau one last time. Erik has some stuff to sort out with his associates (‘Don’t ask,’ he grumbles, and when she frowns: ‘Kochanie, the boys need cash!’) while Magda pesters officials.

When they finally get the news, half the village is gathered at ‘their’ house. Erik has made a fool of himself picking mushrooms (‘You’ll get us all killed!’ giggles Tamary, and Erik makes a mental note to ask her how exactly that would have happened) when Magda storms in with the letter; when she reads it, Gosia starts sobbing, and Iwo and Bodhan start chanting his name. ‘Henryk! Henryk! Henryk!’

‘We won’t be able to lead it,’ Magda says later, when they’re curled up. ‘I don’t think we can even build it. They’ll send in some apparatchik, they always do.’

Erik grins. ‘I adore apparatchiks.’ He strokes her hair. ‘Kochanie?’

‘Hmmm?’

He points around the room. ‘You planned this all along?’

‘I had hope.’ She kisses him. ‘There’s more to you than metal.’

He can’t breathe. Instead, he presses her closer, so tightly it even hurts him. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he mumbles into her hair.

She points to her stomach and smiles.

 ‘It’s time.’

Those words have Erik sobbing. 

**Author's Note:**

> Magdele/Magdalein – little Magda (Yiddish/German)  
> Kochanie: sweetheart (Polish)  
> Shikse: Non Jewish woman/girl, also means ‘hussy’ in standard German  
> Shul: Synagogue


End file.
